CHAPTER III CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would say incoherent, shape in Sartor Resartus,—a book which appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock.

In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental life—his early home training and German literature. In regard to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh—all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain. David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the Shorter Catechism.

Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his father with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood, his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity. Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature. Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and emotions his mind was saturated, and Sartor Resartus was the outcome. To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion—his triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and consolation.

What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot. His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism.

Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable. The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.

What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The answer to this will give the key to Sartor Resartus, and to Carlyle's whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form. Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'

Sartor Resartus is studded with vigorous protests against the mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker, whose duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists, or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:—Reduce matter to its constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and Materialism, and is the root thought of Sartor Resartus, which may be taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by Carlyle thus:—'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing—ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.'

The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his speculative view of the Universe—a view which demands careful analysis if the student hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. It is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic idealism of Sartor. In later days he professed contempt for transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end. After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind. Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic. Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects, colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and which sharply defines the provinces of the two.

But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically as we please, the result is the same—absorption in the universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the better.

In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace which came over his soul when he discovered that the universe was not mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic optimism of Sartor and the heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:—'Carlyle never could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the dictates of conscience, they can call as a witness and sanction to morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. In his famous saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was unconsciously formulating one aspect of evolutionary ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as that brute force and ethical sanctions are identical; what he meant was that in the long run Righteousness will prove the mightiest force in the universe. What is this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly evolved state of society, will mean the survival of the best? In the highest social state the only Might that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards science is deeply to be deplored. He waged bitter warfare against the evolution theory, quite oblivious of the fact that by means of it there was revealed a deeper insight into the Power behind Nature, and into the ethical constitution of the universe, than ever entered into the minds of transcendental philosophers.'

It is taken for granted that Carlyle's thoughts have no organic unity. He is looked upon as a stimulating, but confused, writer, as a thinker of original, but incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind, and pays no deference to the canons of the schools or the market-place. But there is a method in Carlyle's apparent caprice. When analysed, his thoughts are discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism embraces the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In the sphere of morals, as of science, his writings are one long tumultuous protest against the mechanical philosophy and the utilitarian theory of morals. From his essay on Voltaire we take the following:—'It is contended by many that our mere love of personal Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting in every individual with such clearness as he may easily have, will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his own.... Without some belief in the necessary eternal, or, which is the same thing, in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue existing in each individual, could the moral judgment of a thousand or a thousand thousand individuals avail us'? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces the utilitarian system in these words: 'What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion, man may front much. But what in these dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect'! The exponent of such a theory of ethics will have a natural distaste for the rational or calculating side of conduct. He will depreciate the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to the inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid temperament, methodical habits, and utilitarian aims, but men of mystical and passionate natures, spasmodic in action, and guided by ideas not easily justified at the bar of utility.

Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has profound contempt for the Diderots and Voltaires, with their mechanical views of the Universe, so in practical affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who endeavour to further their aims by appealing to commonplace motives by means of commonplace methods. Specially opposed is he to the tendency of the age to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great elemental forces of human nature, but upon organisations, committees, and all kinds of mechanism. In his remarkable essay, 'Signs of the Times,' we have ample verification of our exposition. After talking depreciatingly of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing philosophies, Carlyle comments upon the mechanical nature of the reforming agencies of civilisation. The intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind of Socialism or Collectivism. He says: 'Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery in every outward and inward sense of that word.... Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.... We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our time: in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favours, and its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work; in the whole sources, and throughout the whole current of its spiritual, no less than its material, activity.' With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life were discoverable, not so much by the intellect as by the heart. The man with the large heart, rather than the clear head, saw furthest into the nature of things. The history of German thought is strewn with the wreck of systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition. Schelling and Hegel showed the puerility to which great men are driven when they started to construct science out of their own intuitions, instead of patiently and humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left on record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip of the scientific method, and was able to allow Carlyle's inspiration to play upon his mind without fear of harm; but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from the path of reason into the bogs of mysticism?

Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his determination to follow the promptings of a priori conceptions gave his system of ethics a one-sided cast, and made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come to be known as Evolutionary Ethics. What is the chief end of man considered as a moral agent? The answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it is comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the laws of God revealed in Nature and in the Bible. But apart from revelation, where is the basis of ethical authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian view, and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, Carlyle found refuge in the Fichtean and similar systems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness for Happiness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured to preserve the heroic attitude which was associated with Supernaturalism. In his view, it was more consistent with human dignity to trust for inspiration to a light within than painfully to piece together fragments of human experience and ponder the inferences to be drawn therefrom.

In his 'Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the hollowness of Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness and Happiness. As Spencer puts it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three states—painful, indifferent, or pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in the actor.'

To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed his critical method, by which he all but revolutionised criticism as understood by his Edinburgh and London contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with the Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism never lost its political bias. Apart from that, criticism up till the time of Carlyle was mainly statical. The critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences, on the other defects, and when the two columns were totalled the debtor and creditor side of the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with moral aberration, anything like a correct estimate was impossible. The result was that in Scotland criticism oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit and the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh Reviewers could not afford to set the clergy at defiance, they had to pay due respect to conventional tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from a different standpoint. He introduced into criticism the dynamic principle which he found in the Germans, particularly in Goethe. In contemplating a work of Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of seizing upon the creative spirit, what Hegel called the Idea. The thought of Goethe and Hegel, though differently expressed, resolves itself into the conception of a life principle which shapes materials into harmony with innate forms. In the sphere of life the determining factors are the inner vitalities, which, however, are susceptible to the environment. The critic who would realise his ideal does not go about with literary and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand the spirit which animated the author as shewn in his works and his life, and then studies the influence of his environment. That this is a correct description of Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own remarks in his essay on Burns. He says: 'If an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without: how did he modify these from within?'

This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns.

When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing—a tone which had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined, not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards, but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow aspirations and ideals. In his Heroes and Hero-Worship Carlyle elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart?" David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough—blackest crimes—there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death.... David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below.'

This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson, Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh, breezy air of Nature.

Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an antiquarian nature; he studies his heroes as if they were ancestors of the Carlyle family. He broods over their letters as if they were the letters of his own flesh and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings of a pathos stricken kinsman rather than the conscious reflections of a literary man. It is noteworthy that Carlyle's critical powers are limited by his sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific criticism, is largely influenced by the personal equation. Face to face with writers like Scott and Voltaire, he flounders in helpless incompetency. He tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles, no conscious devotion to heroic ends, no introspective torturings, Carlyle sets himself to a process of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's failure in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the ethical side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he was false to his own principle of endeavouring to seize the dominant idea. Because Scott and Voltaire were not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt with them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired Goethe, but he certainly made no attempt to cultivate Goethe's catholicity. Let us not fall into Carlyle's mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were incompatible with his temperament. After all has been said, English literature stands largely indebted to Carlyle the critic.